Well nothing...i guess. I got me a new PC, played a lot other games like Fall Out New Vegas and stuff and taking screenshots worked fine. Started playing EoD with that new PC and screenshot appear to be black.

I've just reset all the settings to default in my BF42 profile in the Nvidia Systemcontrols...same problem.

To be honest...most of the EoD maps lag like shit on my PC. Even though I use to play with only 25 VC on one side and 13 US on my side or so. Got a 3,8 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAm + a slightly good 1GB SLI Card. I remember times i played BF42 with 256 MB SDRAM...*sniff*. Even FH runs pretty fine for me.
I guess were just megalomaniac, putting 1000+ objects in a map and wondering it lags sometimes.

Well...been searching for used RAMS that fit my Mainboard for months. Guess i need to order some new ones for 60 bucks and stop either smoking or eating! Or both...EoD will run fine then...so why eat or smoke.

What's a 3,8 GHZ CPU, sounds like a microwave?
If it's an old AMD Sempron 3800 EoD will not run without lag, if it's an Athlon 3800 you should have no problems.
But it deppends on several things if EoD is running fine or not.
A bad mainboard and especially a bad onboard soundcard can destroy everything!
I'm running an Athlon 3400 with 64 (!) Bots COOP without any lag and I have an AMD 4200+ with a stupid AC97 onboard sound that cannot handle 10 Bots.
And the RAM is very important for the game.
It's a big difference if the PC has to load every texture from the harddisc or the RAM !
Each EoD map has got a caching system to get the used objects and textures into RAM but if the RAM is full it has to load from disc wich causes lag.

Oh wait...it's MHz (Micro Hertz ).
Actually it's a Celeron CPU with 3,2 not 3,8 MHz (Mega Hearts ) that i run. The mainboard is an Asus P5ND-2 SLI. I just wonder BF42 lags like shit and any other game i played yet seems to run fine at highest settings. Played S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fall out 3, Fall out New Vegas and Assasins Creed II with it and experienced no lag at all. Okay..the Games are more like graphic than ramwhores, but I would have bet 1GB is quite enuff.

But maybe...it's also a Problem with the CPU. The lags appear:

a) when i fly and bots get near in another plane/gaylicopter
b) on startup
c) when i get into a fight with like 10 bots

Well..will buy RAM at the end of this month and then it's all fine i guess.

These RAMS are hard to find, and I didn't want to buy others that just maybe don't work. Or will any other DDR2 RAM with a higher Frequ./Speed work anyway and just be throttled down to my Frequ./Speed?

Wow! No kidding? That'd be great. Ebay Kleinanzeigen had none untill now. As long as i can afford the fee I'd pretty much like to buy it in 2 weeks. Would be a big step foreward for me.

Ah yeah, and of course it's GHz...*lol* I bought the machine for 200 bucks a few months ago. It came with flatscreen (needed a new one...remember the loadscreens...you mentioned all the loaders were very dark...now problem solved), keyboard, W-Lan stick, Win XP, Word 2000 and lots of other things I didn't really need.

After setting up the System an programs on the new PC, i took a walk, because i couldn't sleep, and stumbled across another PC standing on the road wich was quite crappy but contained 2 brandnew 650GB HDDs. Just it's Videocard was broken and someone threw it away because of that.
I've put my 128MB card in it (already bought a 1GB card before) and sold it for 60 bucks with my old HDD in it, sold my old pc for 50 bucks, too, so i paid like 90 bucks for that 3,2GHz, 1GBRAM, 1GB PCIe card and 1,3Tb HDDs. That was my lucky moment this year. (Okay now that was a Cowgirlcalculation "Milchmädchenrechnung" hehe...den merk ich mir).

Nevertheless, to avoid any potential problems you could try to buy some cheap 4 GB's of RAM. Two modules with 2GB each, for example. Although you can only use ~3 GB out of those 4 GB whilst using WinXP, you would have maximum compatibility, having only one type of fast RAM.

Remember: If you combine fast RAM and slow RAM, the comuter usually runs at the speed of the slower one. The mainboard sets the speed limits for your RAM.

Some mainboards are a real pain in the *rse and don't like certain combinations of different modules/brands. It's always a good idea to avoid no-name RAM.

All in all it would cost you something between 15 and 70 Euros, depending on special offers, speed, brand, the kind of shop (store, online store, ebay, ebay kleinanzeigen) and its condition (new/used).

Hey Mono. That was very helpfull. Never knew that and never got into that RAM thing, since I'm not interested enough in technique to read about it.

For the 3GB Limit of XP: I heard you can use 4GB (or more...up to 64GB) of RAM whith XP with physical adress extension (PAE) workaround and maybe a RAMdisk where you put the pagefile...whatever, helpfull post! Thanx!